Posts tagged with 'ubuntu'

In April at the OpenStack Summit, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth quipped “My OpenStack, how you’ve grown” as a reference to the thousands of people in the room. OpenStack is indeed growing up and it seems incredible that this Friday, we celebrate OpenStacks’ 3rd Birthday.

Incredible – it seems like only yesterday OpenStack was a twinkle in the eyes of a few engineers getting together in Austin. Incredible that OpenStack has come so far in such a short time. Ubuntu has been with OpenStack every day of the 3 year journey so far which is why the majority of OpenStack clouds are built on Ubuntu Server and Ubuntu OpenStack continues to be one of the most popular OpenStack distributions available.

It is also why we are proud to host the London OpenStack 3rd Birthday Party at our HQ in London. We’d love to see you using OpenStack with Ubuntu and even if you don’t, you should come and celebrate OpenStack with on Friday, July 19th.

We are exhibiting at this year’s CeBIT event on March 5-9th, 2013 in Hannover Germany, in conjunction with our partner in the region, Teuto.net and we’re giving away number of free tickets to selected customers and partners. If you are interested in one of these tickets, please contact me at anthony.beckley@canonical.com for more information.

The Canonical/Teuto.net stand will be in the Open Source Arena (Hall 6, Stand F16, (030) and we will be showcasing two enterprise technology areas:

We will be running hourly demonstrations on our stand and attendees have the chance to win a Google Nexus 7 tablet! Simply come to out stand and watch a short demo or your chance to win If you would like to pre-register for a demonstration, email me at anthony.beckley@canonical.com

We look forward to seeing you at the show!

CeBIT draws a live audience of more than 3,000 people from over 100 different countries. In just five days the show delivers a panoramic view of the digital world’s mainstay markets: ICT and Telecommunications, Digital Media also Consumer Electronics.
To learn more about CeBIT click here.

These games debut in Ubuntu thanks to the Humble Indie Bundle 7 which is our favorite cross platform, pay-what-you-want, DRM-free bundle that also includes donations to great charities. Game delivery on Ubuntu with the bundle is powered by the Ubuntu Software Center which brings easy installs that are kept up to date with all of Ubuntu just like all of the other thousands of apps available. Enjoy this latest bundle, we will.

If you are curious about the current indie gaming trend, this bundle is for you because it includes the award winning documentary Indie Game: The Movie no matter what you pay.

The Ubuntu 12.10 release saw the Dash take another important step towards fulfilling its intended purpose of being an online, global search tool that helps users find anything, instantly, right from their home environment. There are a number of exciting improvements planned for 13.04 that will make the Dash more comprehensive, more online and as a result – slicker and even more useful. Here’s a snapshot of what is likely to land in the next release:

Smart Scopes – Scopes are the daemons capable of presenting local or remote information right in the Dash. In 13.04, we will increase the number of scopes installed by default in Ubuntu (including many existing community developed scopes) and introduce the ability to automatically light up the right ones based on their relevancy to a user’s search query. For example, a search for “The Beatles” is likely to trigger the Music and Video scopes, showing results that will contain local and online sources – with the online sources querying your personal cloud as well as other free and commercial sources like YouTube, Last.fm, Amazon, etc. To achieve this, the Dash will call a new smart scope service which will return ranked online search results, which the Dash will then balance against local results to return the most relevant information to the user. Scopes are becoming a really interesting contribution area for our developer community – and we can’t wait to see what people will submit to make the Dash an even richer experience.

Instant Purchasing – being able to purchase music or apps directly from the Dash, without opening a browser or a separate client. In 13.04, we expect to enable instant payments, powered by Ubuntu One, for both applications from the Software Center and music from the Music Store – to deliver the fastest possible purchasing experience directly from the Dash.

More Suggestions and User Controls – the More Suggestions scope, which currently returns relevant commercial content available from the Ubuntu One Music Store and Amazon, will expand to include more retailers. We are also testing a few additional user controls like filters for local and global searching – more to come on this front as we learn from those sessions. In the meantime, users can already focus a search to local files only with a simple super-f keystroke.

There are several principles around the Dash that are also worth reiterating:

Its raison d’etre is to provide Ubuntu users the fastest, slickest way to find things right from their home environment – independent of whether those “things” are on your machine, available online, free or commercial. The music and video lenses in the Dash have queried online sources since their introduction, and we will continue to expand our online sources over the next releases. Our testing has overwhelmingly shown that this integrated and unified search feature is the best experience for the vast majority of users – and the best user experience will always be included as a default on Ubuntu.

Privacy is extremely important to Canonical. The data we collect is not user-identifiable (we automatically anonymize user logs and that information is never available to the teams delivering services to end users), we make users aware of what data will be collected and which third party services will be queried through a notice right in the Dash, and we only collect data that allows us to deliver a great search experience to Ubuntu users. We also recognize that there is always a minority of users who prefer complete data protection, often choosing to avoid services like Google, Facebook or Twitter for those reasons – and for those users, we have made it dead easy to switch the online search tools off with a simple toggle in settings.

You have critical decisions ahead as you take your first steps into cloud computing.

One of them will be whether to build a private cloud infrastructure in your own data centre, make use of one of the public cloud services offered by vendors like Amazon, Rackspace and HP, or combine the two in a ‘hybrid cloud’ approach.

You can get closer to the right decision by considering the right questions now:

Budget - How much do you have (or how much don’t you have) to support your cloud strategy?

Speed - When do you need this done? Tomorrow, next year, yesterday…

Demand - How many users will you need to support? And will they call come at once?

Resources - What kind of resources do you have in-house? And how many can you realistically get your hands on?

Privacy -How sensitive is your data? Where are you doing business?

This short, sharp checklist takes you through the process that points you in the right direction and ensures your investments pay off from the start. Download it today.

Hardened sysadmins and operators often spurn graphical user interfaces (GUIs) as being slow, cumbersome, unscriptable and inflexible. GUIs are for wimps, right?

Well, I’m not going to argue – and certainly, command line interfaces (CLIs) have their benefits, for those comfortable using them. But we are seeing a pronounced change in the industry, as developers start to take a much greater interest in the deployment and operation of flexible, elastic services in scale out or cloud environments. Whilst many of these new ‘devops’ are happy with a CLI, others want to be able to visualise their environment. In the same way that IDEs are popular, being able to see a representation of the services that are running and how they are related can prove extremely valuable. The same goes for launching new services or removing existing ones.

This is why, last week, as part of the new Ubuntu 12.10 release, we announced a GUI for Juju, the Ubuntu service orchestration tool for server and cloud.
The new Juju GUI does all these things and more. For those of you unfamiliar with it, Juju uses a service definition file know as a ‘charm’. Much of the magic in Juju comes from the collective expertise that has gone into developing this the charm. It enables you to deploy complex services without intimate knowledge of the best practice associated that service. Instead, all that deployment expertise is encapsulated in the charm.
Now, with the Juju GUI, it gets even easier. You can select services from a library of nearly 100 charms, covering applications from node.js to Hadoop. And you can deploy them live on any of the providers that Juju supports – OpenStack, HP Cloud, Amazon Web Services and Ubuntu’s Metal-as-a-Service. You can add relations between services while they are running, explore the load on them, upgrade them or destroy them. At the OpenStack Summit in San Diego this year, Mark Shuttleworth even used it to upgrade a running* OpenStack Cloud from Essex to Folsom.
Since the Juju GUI was first shown, the interest and feedback has been tremendous. It certainly seems to make the magic of Juju – and what it can do for people – easier to see. If you haven’t seen it already, check out the screen shots below or visit http://uistage.jujucharms.com:8080/

Because as we’ve always known, a picture really is worth a 1000 words.

Starting today, the third Humble Bundle for Android is available, bringing with it three games new to Ubuntu: Spirits, Fieldrunners and BIT.TRIP BEAT. Once again, the Humble Bundle provides for super-easy downloading through the Ubuntu Software Center. The bundle deal is only available for two weeks on a name-your-price basis – just like the Humble Indie Bundle before it – so don’t miss this opportunity. What’s great about this Android bundle is that the games will work on your phone as well as Ubuntu, Mac, Windows and other GNU/Linux desktops and laptops.

All three new games are great fun and will be surefire hits in the Ubuntu Software Center. We know you will like the tower defense game Fieldrunners; Spirits is a solid puzzle game and the pong beats in BIT.TRIP BEAT simply rock. SpaceChem and Uplink are updated for the bundle, so if you were waiting to get either one, now’s your chance. There are DRM-free soundtracks in there, too.

The team behind BIT.TRIP BEAT couldn’t be more excited about the launch of another Ubuntu game. As they explained this week, “releasing our games on Ubuntu takes Gaijin Games one step closer to our ever-present goal of dominating constantly. As our Ubuntu fan base grows and we release more games for the OS, we look forward to dominating constantly TOGETHER.”

Open-source software is increasingly at the heart of the biggest changes happening in enterprise computing all over the world. For me, open cloud is a perfect way to illustrate the benefits open source is bringing businesses and this is the major theme being discussed by some of the biggest names in the industry at the 2012 OpenStack APAC Conference in Beijing right now.

The business case for switching to or adopting cloud computing – and in particular, the open cloud – has never been stronger. Enterprises are realising reduced costs and increased flexibility without the risk of vendor lock-in. Open clouds let organisations move critical workloads to the cloud with the confidence that they can move from one vendor to another or onto a private cloud as they demand. This is because open source technology complies with established open standards.

As well as these business benefits, software like Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is helping devops massively reduce the complexity of cloud projects with deployment and service orchestration tools like Juju and MAAS. These sorts of technologies are streamlining the deployment process, making it quicker and simpler than ever to get applications running in the cloud.

The combination of Ubuntu and OpenStack has rapidly become the platform of choice for businesses building private cloud infrastructure.

The cloud is disrupting the enterprise computing world, driven by the growth of open-source software. As a result, new opportunities are emerging; it’s time to exploit them.

On the 30th October, Canonical will host an Ubuntu Enterprise Summit in Copenhagen. Industry analysts and enterprise users of Ubuntu and open source technologies, will join key figures from Canonical to discuss the opportunities these converging trends present.

The event is designed around three key topics

- How flexibility creates business value
- Choosing which bandwagon to board
- The way ahead, from client to cloud

With a keynotes from Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth and two streams of content – one aimed at business decision-makers and the other at enterprise technologists – it offers an essential briefing on delivering effective IT in a cloud-obsessed world.

As of last week, we are supporting our Spanish partner, Zentyal, in their provision of software and services to small and medium-sized businesses.

Zentyal distribute an operating system of the same name – and it’s based on Ubuntu. It’s designed to offer small and medium-sized businesses easy, low-maintenance access to all the essential business IT capabilities. Alongside the software itself, they include cloud services and support, providing a one-stop shop to answer their customers’ IT needs. The agreement means we’ll be supporting Zentyal in the delivery of these services to its customers.

Ignacio Correas, CEO of Zentyal, explained: “This agreement allows Zentyal and its partners to provide complete Linux infrastructure solutions for small and medium-sized businesses. Although Linux in the enterprise is nothing new, comparable vendor-backed solutions for SMBs simply didn’t exist until now.”

Andrew Cooper, our EMEA Channel Manager, added: “SMB customers can now benefit from Ubuntu-based solutions that might otherwise would be out of their reach. Zentyal has a great deal of experience in the SMB market and, together with their authorised partners, they’ll do a great job in delivering Ubuntu-based solutions for their customers.”

The worldwide, multi-year agreement aims to address the growing IT needs of the SMB sector during tough economic times, offering easy-to-use Linux IT infrastructure solutions and
services for SMBs. And importantly, it represents the first time Canonical has agreed to provide embedded Ubuntu support for a solution from another open-source vendor.

To learn more please join Canonical-Zentyal live webinar on Tuesday 26th June:

Unity Technologies announced Monday that the next version of Unity will support publishing to Ubuntu. This is fantastic news because it will enable developers to deliver their new and existing games to Ubuntu users very easily.

The Unity 4 game engine delivers new features like the Mecanim animation technology and a boost in game fidelity to everyone from the independent developer to a major studio. For game developers the gaming engine provides the majority of the technologies required to deliver a game – including things like sound, graphics and physics. Game studios standardise on using an engine so they can spend their time on the aspects of their game that will be unique. For Ubuntu to be supported by game developers the gaming engines are a critical dependency – without them developers cannot port or target new games.

Unity Technologies made their name with independent developers who often target alternative platforms where they can stand out from the crowd of games created by the major studios. Unity Technologies is well known for their deep technology ability and for targeting alternative platforms such as Android. We have been in discussions with Unity Technologies since last summer as there is a lot of developer demand for a market ripe for awesome games. We are delighted to see Unity commit to publishing to Ubuntu – a significant commitment for a team handling so many platforms.

If you would like to get involved developing or porting games to Ubuntu with Unity during the beta you can pre-order Unity 4 Pro. In the meantime there are lots of resources available on The Ubuntu Developer site. This month we are running the Ubuntu App Showdown contest with fantastic prizes for the best apps developed.

Back in October 2011 we launched a joint initiative with Dell in China to sell machines pre-loaded with Ubuntu through their retail stores. The stores featured Ubuntu on a wide range of Dell computers, carried Ubuntu branded marketing collateral in-store, had trained staff positioning the benefits and advantages of Ubuntu to consumers and were supported by a retail team of Ubuntu merchandisers, set up to support those stores.

Ambitiously kicking off with a goal of 220 stores, the response has been phenomenal – and we’re delighted to confirm that we’ll be expanding the number of stores in China to 350 and beyond over the next few months. Also, look out for great new point-of-sale materials locally designed and produced by the Dell China team.

Behind the scenes we’re also working on a number of cool initiatives in China – improving ways of bringing Ubuntu to you.

Today, we announced that we are now extending this exciting programme into, and across India. To help support the growth and demand in India the program will start with a widescale roll out to 850 stores across India. As well as consumers and students, the stores will target and service the growing number of SMB and corporate customers using Ubuntu across India.

Over the next few months we will extend the retail programme further into new markets, with the goal of providing greater choice of devices pre-loaded with the latest versions of Ubuntu and vastly improved quality of advice from staff in resellers.

We’ve been extremely busy at Computex, with over 1,000 people visiting the Ubuntu booth, and over 25 media interviews about Ubuntu for Android, Ubuntu Cloud and Ubuntu TV.

One of the highlights so far was ARM’s Ian Ferguson, director of server systems and our very own Mark Shuttleworth presenting a keynote session at the Computex industry forum about cloud computing. As part of this, they unveiled MiTAC’s new ARM server, based on Ubuntu. This is only the third ARM server made in the world and it’s a significant step forward in a new era of hyperscale computing. Based on ARM processors, these servers have higher densities and lower power to enable more efficient cloud deployments and lower cost.

The MiTAC server can be seen on the Ubuntu stand at M0106, Nangang Exhibition Hall, alongside the latest developments in Desktop and Cloud until the end of the show on June 9th.

Canonical will be exhibiting at Computex in Taipei, June 5th – 9th, Asia’s largest ICT trade show. We will be at the show alongside some our partners and biggest names in the industry. At the booth (at M0106 in the Nangang exhibition hall) we will be showcasing new products and services, including Ubuntu for Android, Ubuntu TV and Ubuntu Cloud.

Today, Ubuntu for Android will be demoed at a pre-show ARM media gathering and in addition, Mark Shuttleworth will be part of a keynote presentation on Tuesday at the TICC.

We look forward to seeing you at the booth. If you can’t be at Computex, we’ll be updating the blog with pictures and more as it unfolds.

Good news for Ubuntu gamers! We’re excited to be partnering with the Humble Indie Bundle for their newest collection of incredible games, which is available now. This means that following the purchase of the games from Humble Bundle, Ubuntu users will be able to install their games on Ubuntu more easily than ever, using the Ubuntu Software Centre.

The Ubuntu Software Centre provides the easiest and safest way to install software on Ubuntu – not just for the games in the Humble Indie Bundle but also for thousands of desktop applications.

Just like previous releases, the Humble Indie Bundle 5 lets customers name their own price, paying only what they think the software is worth. The proceeds are then split between the game developers, charities and the Humble Bundle organizers. For this bundle, the chosen charities are EFF and Child’s Play.

We’ve also committed to contribute $100 to this bundle for every Humble Indie Bundle 5 game page on the Ubuntu App Directory that receives 5,000 Facebook likes. So please help us spread the word and let’s get captivating puzzle-platformer LIMBO to 5,000 first.

Developers who would like to learn more about adding their games to the Ubuntu Software Centre can check out our developer site, follow UbuntuAppDev on Twitter and like our App Developer Facebook Page.

Pay what you want for a great bundle of games that couldn’t be easier to install.

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is the ideal platform for organisations looking for more cost-effective alternatives to traditional desktop computing. As enterprise moves to cloud-based apps and lighter, more mobile clients, the argument for moving beyond a Windows-only environment has never been stronger. Ubuntu delivers an intuitive, responsive and above all, productive desktop experience at a fraction of the cost of its competitors.

Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS combines the world’s best open source server and cloud technologies with five years of hardware, security and maintenance updates, and of course the option of enterprise-grade commercial support. This combination of proven technologies, time-saving deployment tools and long-term support makes it a cost-effective platform for any workload from print and web serving to big data applications and the cloud.

The first Ubuntu Cloud Summit, hosted by Canonical and Redmonk, takes place in Oakland, California on May 8th and the speakers are now confirmed. It promises to be a riveting day for anyone interested in cloud strategy. If you haven’t secured your ticket yet, there’s still time – but hurry. They are disappearing fast.

Presenting on the day will be:

- Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Ubuntu

- Kyle MacDonald, Director of Cloud, Canonical

- Stephen O’Grady, Principal Analyst & Co-founder, RedMonk

- John Purrier, Vice President of Cloud Infrastructure, HP

- Randy Bias, CTO, CloudScaling

- Patrick Chanezon, Senior Director of Developer Relations, VMware

- Robbie Williamson, Director of Ubuntu Server Engineering, Canonical

The day will cover the role of open-source software in cloud computing, some lessons from real world cloud deployments and an examination of how the cloud technologies in Ubuntu – including OpenStack, MAAS and Juju – come together to form an open cloud.

Kicking off this May, the Ubuntu Cloud Summit is a one day event for both technology and business people interested in what cloud computing can do for their organisations.

Hosted by Canonical and Redmonk we’ll be looking at how open-source is playing a critical role in the move to cloud computing. Delegates will also hear how enterprises have made the most of the move to the cloud using open source. There will be plenty of opportunity for discussion and debate ensuring you have all the information you need to deploy an open cloud.

The day will include a keynote from Mark Shuttleworth and others, plus a panel discussion chaired by Stephen O’Grady of Redmonk, before closing with cocktails and canapes.

The Ubuntu Cloud Summit takes place on Tuesday 8th May, at the The Oakland Marriott City Center in Oakland.

The event is sure to be popular, so don’t miss your chance to be there.

Ubuntu Cloud Day is Canonical’s first Cloud event in Bangalore. With keynote speeches from various members of the Canonical team and a more focussed technical delivery, the event is aimed at engineers and developers with a professional interest in using Ubuntu Cloud as a developer tool, along with those with a keen interest in developing innovative applications for the Ubuntu user base.

The event is sponsored by Intel and the agenda includes presentations on working with Ubuntu Cloud, JuJu, Cloud infrastructure, as well as presentations from Intel and other partners. The sessions will also cover the intricacies of building your own Cloud infrastructure with Ubuntu, managing Cloud workloads on your own servers and sending identical workloads to the public Cloud when you need extra capacity.

The location for Ubuntu Cloud Day is the Grand Ballroom at the Chancery Pavilion Hotel, 135 Residency Road, Bangalore.

The Ubuntu booth at Mobile World Congress has been a resounding success. In the first two days of the show alone, over 4,000 delegates visited the stand to see the first live views of Ubuntu for Android.

The reception has been overwhelmingly positive among hardware manufacturers and operators, and indeed among hundreds of individuals and enterprises who can’t wait to get their hands on a new smartphone running Ubuntu for Android.

The race is on; who will become the first manufacturer to launch one of the most talked about products at the show – the real killer-app from Barcelona 2012.